Writing my first book with the garage door up

the paper trail begins here

Mendocino — December 2023

It’s tiiime! I’m finally embarking on my biggest creative project yet: writing my first book.

It’s been approximately three days since this months-in-the-making idea all came together. It’s been even more months since I’ve felt so compelled to write that I couldn’t sleep. The night of the breakthrough, stories emerged as I tried to fall asleep, writing and rewriting themselves in my mind. Eventually, I gave up trying to sleep, grabbed my laptop, and just let the ideas flow through me. Given my orientation toward following aliveness these days, I think I’ve stepped on to the right path.

I’ve pendulum swung quite a bit on whether I want to share my book writing process publicly, largely because I had convinced myself that serializing my book — releasing it one chapter at a time on Substack — would be a good idea, but I now know myself and my writing process well enough to know that approach is what will keep me from writing this book.

What I actually want to do is write the book with the garage door up. Once I came to this realization on Thursday night, the pieces all clicked into place.

I finally feel ready. This book has been brewing in me — in many ways, it feels like it’s already been written, I just need to sit down and bring it earth side.

This all began back in 2023. In the span of a few months, I’d become good friends with a few authors I respected. Two of them started asking me when I’d write a book and after enough nudging, the idea of me writing my own book no longer felt so farfetched. By the end of the year I shared my intention to write a book more publicly, but at that point, I had no idea what the full process would entail.

Soon after I made my declaration, I went into a state of contraction and fear, promptly deprioritizing the book for several months.

Then in mid-2024, in moments of quietude during kundalini yoga, I started hearing a voice gently calling me to return to China to be with my grandmother while she was nearing end of life. You can be with her in the hospital and write your book, it whispered. Eventually, I realized this must be my intuition speaking and decided to take a leave of absence from my masters program in the spring to travel between the US and China. I took my first trip back in December, but my work at The Commons and a lot of uncertainty with where my grandmother will be transferred after the ICU has kept me in San Francisco for the time being.

My original plan was to fly to China mid-January then fly back last Thursday, February 6th, with a draft of my first book. While my return to China remains in a holding pattern, I’ve been scheming a book retreat with a friend. Then Thursday evening, as fate would have it, I had a catch-up call with my childhood best friend who is serendipitously going through her own creative process and breakthrough in writing her first book. (This is the best friend who I used to write short stories with during recess in fifth grade.) By the end of the call, we’d committed to drafting up a plan and setting up a weekly check-in to keep one another accountable in getting our first drafts done before we arrive at the retreat.

As I started putting my plan together to capture all the momentum I was feeling, one of the first questions that popped into my head was how am I going to keep up with my Substack if I’m committed to writing this book? The immediate next thought was why don’t I just make this a part of my Substack?

And so, I’m taking a page out of my friend,

Jasmine Sun

’s, book and experimenting with a weekly-ish “standup,” sharing out updates on my creative process each week.

I’m excited (and admittedly, a little terrified) about the prospect of writing this book in public. I’m inspired by how meaningful it was to join

Elle Griffin

this week as she kicked off her six-week deep-research an article with me workshop series. It blew my mind how enlightening it is to observe someone else’s research and writing process. I left the workshop buzzing with ways to overhaul my research process, namely the way that I collect my notes.

I’ve always taken book and essay notes linearly — my notes left to die in my highlight graveyard, never to be seen again. Elle, on the other hand, sprinkles the quotes that inspire her through the various draft documents she keeps for each topic until she’s ready to write about it. Revolutionary.

After the workshop, I restructured my existing draft system and set up a lightweight process to manage my research going forward — in a way that finally excites me to read and collect more highlights. Incredible how illuminating 90 minutes of observing Elle’s process was.

Perhaps this window into how I make sense of my own process will serve as some inspiration for a few of you who are thinking about taking the leap on your own creative projects. At the very least, this will be a fun way to keep me organized and scrapbook my journey of writing my first book.

Part of what I hope this project inspires is the notion that we can simply have an idea for a big project and do it. This is one big act of fuck around and find out.

This time around, it all feels more easeful and energizing rather than terrifying and daunting. (Okay, maybe except for the part where I leave the garage door up).

To make it a bit more palatable, I’m going to open up the process to my inner ring of paid supporters. I’ve been struggling to figure out what type of experience I want to offer my paid readers and this feels like a fun peek into the raw and messy aspects of my writing process. These updates will be informal and meandering — a departure from my typical musings and essays which I’ll continue writing in parallel.

Here’s a sampling of the type of update I intend to share:

✅ Decisions made & actions taken this week:

• Confirmed book retreat: we’ve nailed down the date and are in the final stages of booking the Airbnb

  • Putting this retreat on the calendar was the stake in the ground I needed to tell myself: IT’S HAPPENING

• Created a weekly plan: we’ve got 7 weeks until our retreat — from there, I worked backwards and drafted up a weekly plan for what I wanted to get done between now and then to arrive with a first draft

  • Nothing gets me more psyched for a project than a good organized plan

• Consolidated all my notes: for the last year, my notes for the book have been littered across Notion, Obsidian, Substack, Readwise, and my journals

  • Centralizing all my notes into one doc and now knowing where they all live freed up a lot of mental capacity to begin parsing through them

• Decided on Google Docs for book writing: I’ve been blocked on truly starting this project because I kept going back and forth on all the different tools I could use

  • After texting a few author friends for advice and learning how good at formatting Google Docs has gotten in the last year, I finally just made the commitment to use Google Docs for this process

• Brain dump all the questions I have about this process: the random questions I had about how this could go had been taking up a lot of mental bandwidth and kept me from starting the project — by brain dumping everything, it freed up my capacity to actually get to the answers vs swim in the questions

  1. How will I fit book writing into my current writing & research schedule?

  2. Where are all my existing notes scattered?

  3. What tools do I want to use in this process?

  4. What’s actually feasible for the next 7 weeks?

📹 A behind-the-scenes paper trail of my progress from the past week:

At this point, I’ve arrived at enough answers and structure that I’m ready to just do the damn thing and write the messy first draft.

If you enjoy my writing and are interested in this project, I’d be honored if you join me for the ride :)

Have a friend who would enjoy following this project?

Until next week!